Once Around (1991)

January 18, 1991

Review/Film;
She Just Wanted to Be Married

By JANET MASLIN

Published: January 18, 1991

"Once Around" asks this question: Should the father of a naive, sheltered, not very self-sufficient young woman be disturbed if she takes up with a noisy, ostentatious older man who has made far too much money hustling time-share condominiums in the tropics and whose idea of enlivening a family gathering is hiring a belly dancer? It would be a much better film than it is if it had an answer.

"Once Around" is genial, but it lacks the kind of emotional compass that ordinarily indicates to an audience where things stand. Not until the story ends is it clear how Sam Sharpe, the tycoon and wild extrovert played by Richard Dreyfuss, is meant to be understood.

The fault is not in the characterization, since Mr. Dreyfuss, as ever, gives his all and then some. His extravagant gusto is one of the film's more enjoyable aspects. But he exists almost in a vacuum, despite the large and lively Bella family, with whom he becomes rambunctiously involved once he meets Renata (Holly Hunter), the family's desperately marriage-minded daughter. The Bellas manage to talk incessantly about Sam without saying much about how they feel.

Lasse Hallstrom's earlier film, the Swedish "My Life as a Dog," had a sweetness and whimsy that are also apparent in this one. But this director is badly out of place in Boston, where most of "Once Around" is set, and so are the actors who struggle to maintain heavy regional accents. Not much about the Bellas, their house, their squabbling or their celebrating seems truly convincing. The screenplay, by Malia Scotch Marmo, is often strenuous about the characters' earthiness, as if that somehow made them honest.

Renata Bella is first seen surviving the wedding of her sister (Laura San Giacomo) and being jilted by her own longtime beau (Griffin Dunne, who also co-produced the film with Amy Robinson). "I want to hear the exact words you use," she says, in nudging him toward possible nuptials. He succinctly replies, "I don't ever intend to marry you." This sends a weepy Renata into the bed of her hugely indulgent parents (Gena Rowlands and Danny Aiello) and later on a trip to St. Martin in hopes of taking up real estate salesmanship and drowning her sorrows.

There she meets Sam Sharpe, whose flowing white locks and banana-colored suit make him look more like Colonel Sanders than the answer to Renata's lovelorn prayers. Nonetheless, these two are instantly united, singing "Fly Me to the Moon" together only moments after they have been introduced. Almost as quickly, they have returned to Boston, driven up to the Bella house in Sam's limousine and set about unnerving the rest of the Bellas on a full-time basis. The film makes no further attempt to flesh out Sam by explaining who Sam is, where he came from (other than Lithuania, which he mentions lovingly and often) and how he got this way.

Mr. Dreyfuss and Ms. Hunter have an easy, friendly rapport that seems destined to blossom into full-fledged movie romance someday. But so far, with "Always" and with this film, it hasn't happened. They make their way through this story cheerily but without much intensity, even though Ms. Hunter is so fiery a performer that she can seem to be laughing and crying at the same time. This kind of intensity makes the clinginess of her character that much harder to accept. It hardly helps that the screenplay calls for Mr. Dreyfuss to interrupt almost any stab at seriousness with some kind of a gag.

Mr. Aiello and Ms. Rowlands are persuasive, but they are asked to spend too much of the film reacting uncertainly to the antics of their would-be son-in-law. Only when they begin telling him off does the film cut through its own capriciousness and show a little grit.

The title refers to Sam in particular and to the film in general, at its most irritatingly antic, since Sam has a cute habit of driving around Boston's traffic circles for good luck. First he and then the film's other characters are allowed to do this enough times to make an audience dizzy.